I have a dilemma. I have domain.net. I can buy from the current owner domain.com. domain.net is 1 year old, approximately 200 backlinks, and PageRank 0. I have a pretty decent website on this domain. domain.com is 9 years old, 13 backlinks and PageRank 0. There is a micro website on this domain which is indexed by Google. The site has only a tittle and a couple of links on it. Now, does it make sense to buy from the current owner domain.com? If so, what should I do with the .com? 1.redirect .com to .net 2.move my site entirely to .com and redirect .net to .com 3.create a micro-website on .com with a link to .net
Depends on how much the dot com costs and how much revenue potential the site has.. Dot com is always preferred. If you have both, redirect .net to .com.
Yes if you can get it for not a high price then you can surely buy it and put it on 301 re-direct but if the owner asks for too much then leave it.
My advice is do nothing. If you don't need .com for any special purpose (like, if you want to put the .com domain on auction after a few years), don't purchase it. There is no basic difference of impression in .com and .net. But are global tlds and have same impact on search engines. Again; this is applicable if you have no intension to sell those domains or website on auction. If your .net domain has 200 backlinks, and the website contains valuable contents, the PR will itself rise. It's just the factor of time.
I have similar story, I got a PR 3 blog for blogger and I bought a .net domain and all the PR, back links and indexed page are not recovered they said my blog will redirect and it happen but my some didn't return.
What do you need it for? There are many reasons why people buy additional domains.If it will not add any value to the business then forgot it.
I think about buying the .com domain only because I know that old domains tend to be ranked much higher by Google than new domains. Suppose that I buy the .com domain and then move my site from .net to .com. Can I expect that my site will be ranked higher because it is on the old domain?
Buy the .com domain only if you think that people would actually search for your site by the domain name. Like for example, abc.net is a popular domain name and people would search for domain directly. Now, .com has more value because people tend to search for any domainname.com, instead of domainname.net. If you think, people won't be searching for your doamin name straight away, then leave .com and focus on your .net domain. You have lot many backlinks on your .net domain. Optimize it properly, and you'll eventually gain rankings on this domain. Also, redirecting a domain to another domain, does not pass everything. Redirect only if there is no other option, becuase you tend to lose few backlinks and other rankings.
Yes search engines do favor old domains a bit, but if you have to spend more money I would advice you to leave it and spend the same amount in link building process.